Hi, I’m Carol Anne Meyer from CrossRef. Thanks so much for having me here today. As you have heard, PDFs exploring in the the wild are very useful things for researchers. They can live in many places, both legitimately, and sometimes in violation of copyright. They live on author home pages, in institutional repositories, in subject matter repositories. They live as email attachments, as random files on a scholar’s hard drive, in paper management systems such as PubGet, Mendeley, Papers, Zotero and others. They even live on publishers’ web sites--what I’ll call the mother ship. \n\n
\nBut scholarly research articles and other documents aren’t carved in stone. It may be rare, but things happen to published scholarly content--things like corrections, errata, protocol updates, and yes, in the worst cases, retractions. Responsible publishers take steps to inform their readers when something like this occurs. \n
But when a PDF is out on its own, exploring, with no ties to the mothership, it is possible, nay even likely, that a researcher may cite an article without knowing of the correction.\n
In fact, in research that Phil Davis conducted for us last year, he discovered of 1,779 retracted articles from PubMed from 1973-2010\n 308 (12%) had publicly-accessible copies (excluding published version on journal website)\n 90% of copies were published version; 9% final manuscripts; 1% other\n 41% in PMC; 28% on educational sites; 7% commercial\n 24% copies with retraction notices (5% excluding PMC page view)\n
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A researcher will simply click on the CrossMark logo on a PDF or a publisher’s HTML page. The existence of the CrossMark indicates the publisher commits to keep it updated. \n
You see the CrossMark dialog box. And this is what most people will see - confirmation that the document is up to date, the CrossRef DOI link that will always point to the publisher-maintained copy, and a link to the publisher’s policies.\n
In this case, the researcher easily sees that updates are available for this document. It says that there is a correction and gives a link to the correction using the permanent link--the CrossRef DOI.\n\n
This is where you can show additional metadata about the piece of content if you choose to do so. This particular data from one of our pilot participants, the International Union of Crystallography, and you can see that they are sharing some really useful information on the copyright, review process and publication history. \n\nOther types of information that could be displayed here include funding information and location of data deposits\n
Any CrossRef member in good standing may begin to deposit CrossMark metadata beginning in April. It has been our experience in the pilot that it does take time for publishers to collect the data an institute a workflow to create and update their CrossMark metadata, so if you are interested, start thinking about how you would go about it and what optional metadata you would like to highlight now.\n\nThank you. \n